Delayed Rays of a Star

by Amanda Lee Koe

  Give me a minute, she said to the maid. Step out.

  Madame, the maid said, I can help you, anything.

  Privacy, Marlene said. Something you don’t understand. Don’t come in till I call for you. After making sure the maid shut the door behind her, Marlene removed her panties, fishing a line of toilet paper to wrap the pad up with. There was no bin in the bathroom, so the damp wad she tucked away as best she could behind a water pipe.

  Ready, Marlene called.

  The maid knocked and reentered. Checking that the temperature of the bathwater was comfortably warm, she lowered Marlene down into it slowly by the armpits. When Marlene was settled, the maid took the bath sponge to her, gently glossing over breasts and groin.

  I’ll never get clean this way, Marlene complained. Scrub harder!

  Back in the room, Marlene sniffed the fresh scent of soap in a line down her forearm and rearranged her legs under the blanket as the maid toweled her dry. Some of Marlene’s pubic hair, still a dark dirty blond, fell out. The maid was bashful, moving the towel quickly to disperse the hair. Marlene caught her eye and laughed. Oh you prude, Marlene said. We need some music, put on the Piaf LP!

  * * *

  —

  A PROPER BATH, not a wipe down or a sponging in bed, but a real one with soap bubbles in a tub, was quite an occasion. Her onetime beau’s unyielding voice filled out the dark corners of the apartment as the maid picked out fresh clothes for Marlene. The soiled sheepskin was no longer on the bed. Marlene felt plain without it. She saw it folded discreetly into a dry cleaner’s bag in the doorway, as the maid came over with a selection of nightgowns and underthings. Marlene picked out what she wanted to be dressed in: mauve panties, a silk dressing gown. To top it off, a decorative antique Japanese kimono presented to her when she performed her cabaret years ago in Tokyo. The musicians had been late, and Marlene was so incensed she’d tried to push the kimono back into the hands of the apologetic organizer, who bowed so low his nose was almost touching his knees, as she proclaimed: Take back your bathrobes! None of you are to be trusted, I have not forgotten Pearl Harbor!

  A trumpet solo. Edith was singing “La Vie en Rose” over the record player.

  If you die, Marlene had said tearfully to Edith when she was very ill, I’ll never sing “La Vie en Rose” at my shows again.

  Edith died. Marlene went on singing “La Vie en Rose.”

  It was an audience favorite; Edith would have understood.

  In the first place, Marlene had never really liked performing cabaret, but it paid so well, and she was in demand on the stage. It was the sixties, and the movies were overrun with skittish gamines like Audrey Hepburn. Roles for the screen still came Marlene’s way, but they were small supporting parts, and she had zero interest in playing some ingenue’s mother. What had any of them done to deserve her? At least on the stage it was still her show—people came out to see Marlene alone. She’d perfected her routines on her USO tours in the forties, having signed up as an entertainer for war morale with the Office of Strategic Services. Departing for “Destination Unknown” in the spring of 1944 with a fifty-five-pound luggage allowance, she managed to pack tropical uniforms, gray flannel men’s trousers, combat boots, transparent Vinilite slippers, lingerie, one silk-lined Mainbocher cashmere jumper, one strapless brocade gown, and two long sequined dresses, one in white and the other in gold. Practical as ever, she carried with her three months’ supply of cosmetics, labeled clearly in block letters using her nail polish, so she could put her face on by torchlight. North Africa was where she’d cut her teeth, entertaining GIs waiting to do battle along the Mediterranean with Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Sirte and Tobruk. Their favorites were “No Love No Nothing,” “Anny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “The Boys in the Backroom,” and of course, “Lili Marleen.” With these performances she learned how to pitch her voice, time her laughs, and deal with hecklers. Marlene liked to open her USO shows hidden in the audience. Whenever she made her way onstage and began changing from a GI uniform to one of her sequined dresses in front of a thousand sex-starved active-duty GIs, they roared.

  She would never forget that sound.

  It wasn’t long before she was one of the boys. She liked that about herself, and the boys seemed to like that about her, too. Luncheon meat spread thickly over malted milk biscuits with the back of a pull-ring can in Sirte. Nothing but K-rations for two weeks in the Ardennes, melting snow in a helmet to wash her face. Her only luxury was a special bar of soap for the hair that would lather in hardly any water. Marlene had no airs as she chatted with the GIs, warmed her frostbitten hands over a fire, listened to their stories. Her vinegar douche kit saw plenty of use. There was a sweetness Marlene sensed in each and every GI. They were so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them, when they were the ones putting their bodies on the line of active resistance to earn everyone else at home their oblivious right to passive freedom. To Marlene, singing for them and bedding down with them hardly felt like enough. During a broadcast for the Armed Forces Network she forgot herself, launching into rapid-fire German and addressing Axis servicemen, when she was meant to be speaking in English to Allied soldiers: Jungs! Opfert euch nicht! Der Krieg ist doch Scheiße, Hitler ist ein Idiot! Sent back to L.A. on sick leave upon contracting pneumonia, Marlene was asked by the press when she would be returning to the movies. After being out there, she said, I don’t know if I could concentrate now on keeping every eyelash right like you have to do here, you know?

  * * *

  —

  THE ONLY CABARET Marlene had ever been nervous about performing was a Berlin show in the summer of 1960. It was her first time back in Germany since the war ended. She’d marched in on the side of the victorious Allies in 1945, and her fellow Germans must have been out to settle a score. Ticket sales in Cologne were dire, and Essen had canceled. The five days in Berlin were whittled down to three. Her manager was keeping tabs on the letters to the editor sent in to German papers ahead of her tour:

  Aren’t you ashamed to set foot on German soil as a common, filthy traitor? You should be lynched as the most odious of war criminals. Signed, for all my German brothers and sisters.

  Artists like Marlene Dietrich and Thomas Mann knew that their homeland had fallen into the hands of a band of criminals. Should they have remained silent, just because they were Germans? Was Marlene perhaps not a better German for demonstrating that there were other Germans? Who showed more character: Marlene, who resisted all the lures of an admiring Hitler and went into battle without compromise against criminal Nazi Germany, or we, who bowed before the Nazi cross?

  It would perhaps be better for Marlene and for us if she stayed where she is. It would save her a lot of trouble and make it easier for us to forget the ardent enemy of the Germans, and to keep in memory only the great actress.

  Honored Madame, where do you get the nerve to put on a show in Berlin after your behavior during wartime? We recall like it was yesterday the shameful images of you dressed up in an American soldier’s uniform, boosted up into the air by your ankles to kiss Allied sailors returning from decimating our brave naval warships. We wish you a correspondingly friendly reception readied by the German public.

  Darling, I worry only about the eggs, Marlene had joked with the press in New York before boarding her flight. Eggs leave such awful gooey streaks! The American journalists laughed as she grazed the soft white feathers of the lapel with her fingers. You see I have the only swansdown coat in the world, she went on, milking it, and if an egg ever hits it, I don’t know what I’ll do. You couldn’t clean it in a million years.

  Marlene, right after the German tour, you go on to Israel. Then you’ll be back in Vegas, before moving on to France. What is the hidden message behind the sequence of countries in your tour schedule?

  If I wanted to say anything, Marlene said, I would have said it directly. That is wh
at has landed me in hot soup with my people.

  Marlene, do you think the opposition to you in Germany is a repressive expression of collective guilt?

  I abhorred the Nazis, Marlene said, that is a fact. But I never once abhorred the country. I leave the rest up to the people to decide.

  Marlene, do you identify more as German or American?

  At the best of times, Marlene said, categorical limitations should be difficult to determine, in nationality as in gender. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English?

  Making ceremonious banter with American journalists in New York was vastly different from seeing Berlin like a tin toy city from overhead. As the plane circled Tempelhof airport, she felt woolly in the throat. So many years away, and Berlin had looked like the end of the world in 1945. Growing up in Schöneberg she knew Berlin was in her future. One day she would be old enough to cross the canal. Just a stone’s throw from where their house stood was the fastest city in the world. She’d heard about the massive underground railway, the girls in drop-waist dresses who guzzled lager in dance halls and the boys in tweed berets who took their hands, the opera houses with painted ceilings, attended by women with rose-gold lorgnettes that could magnify the players onstage by a factor of three!

  It was only a matter of time.

  Seeing a whole bunch of Germans carrying large welcome cards waiting at the terminal in Tempelhof, Marlene was pleasantly surprised, but when she got closer, she saw what the signs said: MARLENE GO HOME! How efficacious, how economical, how wholly German it was of them to have the signs read MARLENE GO HOME instead of MARLENE GO BACK TO AMERICA! Her minder tried to shield and bundle her into the waiting limousine.

  Marlene, what do you have to say about this greeting?

  Is it true that you once said you would kill Hitler with your pussy?

  She had to laugh as she ducked into her car. How had they got wind of that? It had been a serious-frivolous remark she half remembered making to goad the important men at a champagne brunch on the Riviera into some form of action or reflection. The war had not yet begun, no one was even taking the threat of it seriously back then; rather, they were trying to get into her pants.

  Marlene, what is in your purse?

  The frivolity of this question was refreshing, although the actual answer was banal: other than her passport, the customized Hermès mini held an assortment of strong painkillers for her bad leg. She wanted to know: Why do you ask?

  Because it is so tiny.

  My costume, she quipped, as the door was shut and her ride drove off.

  Later that evening, the opening applause at Titania Palast in Berlin was lukewarm, and Marlene did away with her signature drawn-out “Hel-lo.” With no fanfare, she opened with “Falling in Love Again.” Her vocal range had always been quite narrow, but she knew how to maximize it by singing sprechgesang style and performing popular oldies that were low on technical difficulty but loaded up with misty-eyed nostalgia. Next up was a ditty she’d learned from a butch singer in a girl-on-girl Damenklub all the way back in the twenties, “Kleptomaniacs”:

  Perhaps it sounds pathetic, but we find it quite magnetic

  Though our palms and pants get wettish, it is nothing but a fetish.

  Then of course “Lola Lola.”

  She saw in her head the audience picturing her as naughty Lola in The Blue Angel, leg hitched up on a barrel. On the day she shot the barrel scene, that cross-eyed sycophant Leni Riefenstahl had visited the set and hovered around Jo with “craft questions.” Marlene hated anyone who wasted someone else’s time, and on a shoot, individual time was collective. Worst of all, Jo, whom everyone knew as a cutthroat tyrant, was patiently answering her vapid questions like an affable puppy, allowing her to look through the viewfinder as they discussed focus racking. Deviously Marlene began to scratch her armpit. When that did not make enough of an impression on Jo, she raised her leg higher and higher on the barrel, till finally Jo shouted at her from behind the camera: Put down your leg, Marlene, everyone can see your pubic hair! It worked wonderfully. The fishface was so scandalized she bade Jo good-bye, making some sanctimonious remark about “not distracting him from his lead actress.” Bitch, please, na klar!

  She began to feel the audience relaxing into her as she finished “La Vie en Rose,” and when she got to the rousing “All Alone in a Big City,” she made sure to credit the song to Wachsmann and Kolpe, dedicating her performance to them. Their Jewish last names had been erased from the annals of pop culture since 1933, a ruling that had not yet been revised; there were more urgent reparation issues for the new constitutions to grapple with. As the last bars faded out under the pianist’s pedal, Marlene angled her face away from the microphone, lifting her cheekbones to catch the light. “Lili Marleen” came next, and she wanted to be ready for that. Everyone knew this was the classic she sang to American and French servicemen in English as they battled German contingents. Now here is a song that is very close to my heart, she said, sounding more confident than she felt. I sang it during the war. I sang it for three long years, all through Africa, Sicily, Italy, to Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, to England, through France, through Belgium—to Germany. She nodded at her pianist, and as the opening bars of “Lili Marleen” came on, she took a deep breath before she began to sing the German version:

  Vor der Kaserne, vor dem grossen Tor

  Stand eine Laterne, und steht sie noch davor.

  It was very quiet as she went through the first stanza. At the chorus, she dropped her voice and bowed her head to the audience. It would be their choice to hold her up or leave her hanging. Wie einst Lili Marleen, she heard the words coming back. The audience was singing it to her.

  She was home.

  * * *

  —

  ELEVEN CURTAIN CALLS and two encores later at Titania Palast, Marlene locked herself in her dressing room, injecting her legs with cortisone and stuffing them back into their boots before hopping into her ride back to the hotel lounge for her Berlin after party. When she stepped out of the limousine toward the Park Hotel, there was a small crowd awaiting her, and Marlene was approached by a girl in a mullet haircut who tugged on the sleeve of her swansdown coat. She disliked it when people pulled on her, but she was in a buoyant enough mood so she turned around, ready to sign an autograph. The girl spat in her face.

  The spit was warm on Marlene’s cheek.

  Her minder gasped, rummaging through her purse for tissue.

  It is just as well Marlene Dietrich is an actress, the girl snarled loudly for everyone to hear, for she is a class hypocrite! She asks of the people, Where were you when the time came to resist the Nazis? And where was she? Living it up in America!

  Do you want me to call the police, Marlene’s assistant whispered as they walked on. Marlene shook her head.

  If I were a rich and famous actress, I, too, would have put my feet up in a Hollywood mansion, the girl went on. But unlike the whore, I would not have made it seem like everyone had a choice in the matter. I would not have traded in my passport to suck American dick, I would not have made singing for Allied soldiers seem like a life’s work, I would not have posed for Vogue in a GI uniform, as if war were a fashion statement, and I would not have proclaimed loudly that Germany begat her just deserts! Go back to America, two-faced cunt!

  14

  When Ibrahim asked Bébé to accompany him on a weekend trip to the Baltic Sea, she said okay. She had never been to the beach before. Because Bébé did not know how Europe was shaped or scaled, she was surprised when Ibrahim told her they would be on a train for eight hours.

  So far?

  We are passing from one country into another, he drew it out for her, France into Germany. They would take the sleeper train on Friday and arrive in Travemünde, an islet on the tip of Germany, at dawn on Saturday. On Saturday evening they would take t
he sleeper train again, arriving back in Paris early on Sunday. Are there not beaches nearer Paris, she asked. Yes, he said, but Travemünde was where his mother was buried. Sorry, she said. He told her it was an accident that had happened ten years ago, and he was no longer sorry, but every summer he visited to tidy up the grave. Bébé wanted to tell Ibrahim about the powdery smell of joss sticks and the burning of silver-leafed paper at the graves of ancestors she’d never met on the fifteenth day after the spring equinox, but she did not know how to explain it to him. I don’t even know these people, she remembered saying to her mother behind her father’s back. Don’t talk like that, her mother said. If not for them, there wouldn’t be you. Isn’t that a way of knowing a person, too?

  The train would leave from Gare de l’Est. From Paris they would pass Cologne, Hamburg, Lübeck. They met at the platform. Ibrahim was in a gray hoodie, and Bébé was in her swansdown coat. He laughed when he saw her. Ah, she blushed. You know, he said, as they bought hot coffee and cheap oily madeleines at the station canteen and boarded the train early, I can’t understand anything about you. She wanted to know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He said it was neither. Some things are just what they are, he said, as the train pulled out of the station.

  * * *